Global Legal Imagination

Last year marked the fiftieth anniversary of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination, in which he interrogates the possibilities and limitations of law and its relationship with language and literature, developing a way of thinking about the creative activities of mind and imagination that he situates at the heart of both law and language. In his foreword to a recent edition of the work, he remarks on its enduring significance: “I think in fact that it may be of wider relevance now than when it was first published, for its central concern is with integrity—integrity of the law, of language, of the individual person—at a time when integrity itself sometimes seems to be threatened as a value.” This seminar seeks to examine the concept of legal imagination broadly and comparatively conceived from different perspectives across a range of cultures, contexts, and periods. How might creative intersections of law and language drive innovation in ideas and form and potentially serve to shape or challenge the contours of different structures of power?